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Chaz'z kitchen diary, 21/06/13
Jun. 21st, 2013 02:28 pmSolstitiality: it is too totally a word, and you-all should celebrate it. *nods*
Last night I made a pork-and-chickpea curry for dinner, with a Gujerati cabbage-and-carrot dish on the side and my infamous lemon-rice-without-the-lemon*. We have leftovers, yay; but those are for another day. For lunch today I revisited the '80s, which must've been when I first came across the notion of a salad tiède. (In honesty, it's pretty much the decade where I came across the notion of salads in general, as something one might actually want to eat; the record of the '60s and '70s in that regard was less than stellar.) Of course we called them Tired Salads, 'cos look, the spinach has gone all wilty, it just can't hold its head up any more...
Ahem. We were, y'know. Young. We may even have thought ourselves original.
Anyway: I destrung some sugar snap peas (I like doing that, it's pleasantly fiddly and lets some of 'em split open in the pan and spill out their little globes of sweetness) and sizzled them under a lid in olive oil until tender. They went into a bowl, and sliced chicken breast went into the same oil. Sizzle sizzle, join the peas. Then lardons of homemade bacon, same pan, same oil, sizzle till crisp and toss into the bowl with, yes, a couple of handfuls of baby spinach (not from the garden; why don't I grow spinach in the garden?). Then I deglazed the hot pan with red wine vinegar, and that made the dressing. A bit of grey French sea salt, a little black pepper, tossity-toss and there it is. With an heirloom tomato sliced and adorned with torn basil leaves, pepper and oil: a lunch fit for a wife, say I. Tired or otherwise.
*The well-established tradition here is that I simply forget to add the lemon, even if I have the thing sliced on the block there and ready to squeeze - I have a consistent track-record of forgetting last-minute garnishes: when a dish leaves the pan and enters the dish, I just assume it's done, largely - but this week I learned that Karen doesn't actually like lemon rice when I remember the lemon. So now I have to remember to leave it out deliberately. Which is much harder, as it turns out. Ah, the trials of husbandry...
Last night I made a pork-and-chickpea curry for dinner, with a Gujerati cabbage-and-carrot dish on the side and my infamous lemon-rice-without-the-lemon*. We have leftovers, yay; but those are for another day. For lunch today I revisited the '80s, which must've been when I first came across the notion of a salad tiède. (In honesty, it's pretty much the decade where I came across the notion of salads in general, as something one might actually want to eat; the record of the '60s and '70s in that regard was less than stellar.) Of course we called them Tired Salads, 'cos look, the spinach has gone all wilty, it just can't hold its head up any more...
Ahem. We were, y'know. Young. We may even have thought ourselves original.
Anyway: I destrung some sugar snap peas (I like doing that, it's pleasantly fiddly and lets some of 'em split open in the pan and spill out their little globes of sweetness) and sizzled them under a lid in olive oil until tender. They went into a bowl, and sliced chicken breast went into the same oil. Sizzle sizzle, join the peas. Then lardons of homemade bacon, same pan, same oil, sizzle till crisp and toss into the bowl with, yes, a couple of handfuls of baby spinach (not from the garden; why don't I grow spinach in the garden?). Then I deglazed the hot pan with red wine vinegar, and that made the dressing. A bit of grey French sea salt, a little black pepper, tossity-toss and there it is. With an heirloom tomato sliced and adorned with torn basil leaves, pepper and oil: a lunch fit for a wife, say I. Tired or otherwise.
*The well-established tradition here is that I simply forget to add the lemon, even if I have the thing sliced on the block there and ready to squeeze - I have a consistent track-record of forgetting last-minute garnishes: when a dish leaves the pan and enters the dish, I just assume it's done, largely - but this week I learned that Karen doesn't actually like lemon rice when I remember the lemon. So now I have to remember to leave it out deliberately. Which is much harder, as it turns out. Ah, the trials of husbandry...